Phillips has worked in a variety of careers, including teaching modern dance, traveling with a carnival, co-owning an antiques shop and driving a taxi. But it's the organization he founded, Phoenix Commotion, that's been a constant over the last 15 years.

The Huntsville-based initiative has already started transforming its community. Phillips has built more than a dozen structures, mostly homes, in and around this small city just outside Houston. It's there he finds cheap lots, subdivisions without deed restrictions and houses that are deteriorating.

That's where Phoenix Commotion steps in, to salvage dilapidated structures with materials that some would consider "trash."

"All these houses are built from between 70 and 80 percent recycled material," Phillips says. "It seems picky to be throwing materials away when you have these families that would do anything to own a house."

It's those found materials that inspired the name behind his organization Phoenix Commotion: a phoenix rising to live again. Anything that has seemingly met its expiration date can be reborn and put to use. Beer cans can become house panels, shards of mirrors can create a mosaic backsplash in the kitchen, CDs become a colorful ceiling mural and broken tree branches become staircase banisters.

It's the items Phillips finds that inspire the design, although he also puts out the word when he has a particular vision.

When word-of-mouth spread that Pheonix Commotion could use wine corks, Spec's Wine, Spirits & Finer Foods sent him an 18-wheeler of wine corks that were resurrected into house paneling and flooring.

"Do you know how much you can do with an 18-wheeler of wine corks?" he laughs. "A lot."

Now he's on the look-out for toothpaste tubes. There's no telling what they'll form in the future, although the current plan is to turn them into a ceiling lining.

Creating a movement

Apart from building reclaimed-goods homes, Phillips is also the director for Smither Park, an art-driven Houston park dreamed up by the city's Orange Show organizers (who also operate the Beer Can House). Folk-art collector Stephanie Smither called upon Phillips to direct the design of the park – which is named after her late husband – after being inspired by his work. It's both his time-trained homebuilding skills and his passion for finding the value in what most people see as worthless scraps that's drawing international attention.

"I hear from people all over the world," Phillips says. "We may have invented excess, but the problem of waste is worldwide."

Phillips' reach has been aided by his TED Talk video, in which he addresses the housing market becoming a commodity.

"We have confused Maslow's hierarchy of needs just a little bit. On the bottom tier we have basic needs, second is security, third is relationships and fourth is status and self-esteem; that is vanity," he says in his presentation. "And we're taking vanity and shoving it down (to the bottom tier). So we end up with vain decisions and we can't even afford our mortgage."

Part of Phillip's mission is changing that mindset and reminding consumers to "reconnect with the primal parts of themselves."

"What we need to do is say, 'Wouldn't it be fun to have bottle caps on the floor?'" he explains. "It may fail, and I fail ten times a day. But failure informs success."

Ultimately, Phillips aims to bring to life his organization's moniker and to spark a movement aided by free-thinking design that creates usefulness and beauty.

"It's a commotion. My mission is to get this idea to catch on. I end up annoying people often, but that's my job: to change the mindset of the culture," he explains. "We won't get out of the rut we're in until we change the marketing industry or we'll have to find another planet."